Many mobile devices interact with a user by providing haptic feedback and/or vibration alerting. In general, vibration alerting provides a crude, single, high-frequency vibration or “buzzing” whereas haptic feedback provides a more granular, complex harmonic response that can be varied in both frequency and magnitude of signal.
Although both alerts use vibrations to communicate with the user, haptic feedback devices often use a variety of advanced waveforms to convey information to the user. Vibration alerting products are typically less complicated and are generally designed to produce a strong enough vibration to alert the user of an event.
Currently, audio alerts can provide nuanced acoustic communication by using different tones and musical passages that the user can independently assign to specific types of alerts such as texts, emails, missed calls etc. A vibration alert does not generally allow for such distinction.